The Hypos drifted through CTA25OR624’s asteroid belt. Their queen, Chrissie, liked this star, but she was feeling a tad bored. Waiting for the break of day, as it were.
Her favourite event, the consummation, was still ages away. This was when their host star would bloat into a red giant, and pour energy into every Hypo within range. Then they’d feast, pack up, and swan off to the next system like a gang of interstellar freeloaders.
Continue readingMissy was all about stuff. Looking for stuff, gathering stuff, organising stuff and dreaming of ways to procure more of it.
If anyone was having a clear out, she was onto it. “I’ll take that”, being her catchphrase. A broken lampshade left on the street – “I’ll take that”. A friend giving away an art easel with sticky oil paints – “I’ll take that”, despite having no intentions of ever painting. Leftovers at a potluck dinner “Ok if I take that?” while simultaneously whipping the half-eaten cherry pie into a Jiffy bag.
Although she sulked about her nickname Miss Take but could hardly argue with it.
Continue reading‘Sometimes I wish I was someone else.’
Bob, having finally got Edna to talk about herself, hesitated then asked: ‘Do you feel…?’
‘Unwanted?’
They were in a pub in Peckham, both sipping warm beer, the nineteen-fifties three days from ending.
‘The next decade’s going to be better,’ Bob said. ‘Attitudes are going to change.’
Continue readingIt was in all the papers. And everyone felt they knew old Vic because he was always in town with his little dog and his collecting cup. He liked a chat with anyone who was passing and you could often see him walking unsteadily from pitch to pitch. People sometimes bought him a Starbucks coffee or a Greggs sausage roll rather than put money in his pot (there was a bit of a moral dilemma around giving money in case it got spent on booze, drugs or fags. My view has long been that if drugs booze or fags are just what you need, then so be it ).
Continue readingAlright I’ll tell you the score. My old man said I was a mistake, said marrying my mam was a mistake, said his whole bloody life since he first met her was a goddam major mistake.
My mam, knocked up at nineteen, possessed a good catholic heart and insisted on keeping the baby (moi) whilst her old man metaphorically whipped out his shotgun, demanding that my dad do the right thing.
Despite his pleas for adoption (if abortion was out of the question) dad decided to stick it out. At least until I was six years old, before saying: “Fuck this” and vamoosed. Yeah, picture me still with my baby teeth, being told that dad isn’t coming back. He’s not dead or sick, he just isn’t around anymore.
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Photo by Michelle Gregor on Unsplash
They grew us a new body. It was ready the morning we married. It wasn’t hers, and it wasn’t mine. This was the fairest way, they said, so no one would be favoured. Our old bodies went to the furnace by evening. I signed the merge as the last act of a solitary person and woke with hands and a heart belonging to both of us.
For nine days, I was happy.
Continue readingNoah was still taking a deep, pollen-filled breath beneath the wisteria when Carrie opened the door. He hadn’t yet manifested his Cat-Shelter-Worker persona, let alone pressed the doorbell.
He’d always thought the photos of Carrie in those speculative articles were filtered, but here she was, not a line on her sixty-year-old face. Her sharp blue eyes narrowed as she regarded him.
Continue readingThe management plan was never going to work, obviously. An NVQ in business studies simply didn’t cover these aspects of workforce management. By the end of the day the situation had descended into a plan for saving managerial face and finally releasing everyone to their homes and local pubs. The union managed to extract a promise of overtime at quadruple rates in return for waiving any right to begin legal action alleging unlawful, enforced detention in a workplace.
Continue readingJuniper loved the walk from the cottage to the battered blue post box at the end of her lane. Her steps took on a lightness as she padded barefoot, swaying with baby Violet tucked on her hip, high on the savoury aroma of wild garlic. Pale yellow primroses, cowslips and bluebells caught the bucolic spring sunshine. This corner of Dorset would always be home. Her mother and grandmother had grown up here. It was here that Juniper could better remember her mother Astrid – the arc of her nose, the daffodil chains they had made, the scent of milky rice pudding straight from the Aga.
Continue reading“Forgive me Father,” the boy’s voice whispered in the dark, “for I have sinned.”
“And what,” asked the kindly voice of Father McDonald “have you done?”
“I’ve murdered someone.”
A brief silence.
“I see, my child.”
“I poisoned Father McPhearson.”
Continue readingThe dwarf realm of Barin-Ti had held strong for a thousand years but now it was dreadfully sick.
The native dwarves had resisted the attacks of the warriors of Am-Nor and An-Morn, defending themselves with axes and cannons, refusing to surrender.
Only now a more persistent and insidious threat had appeared. These new invaders method of conquest was importing huddled masses, coming to the dwarf kingdom in hopes of a better life.
Continue reading‘Trail my wife and get me evidence of hanky-panky. That way I can divorce the bitch cheaply.’ The guy, Ben Blaidd, had mean eyes that might have been filched from a rat. Then he hissed, ‘I want dirt, I want grubby.’
I’m Johnny Gumboot, private detective. Grubbiness, you could say, is engrained in my calling. Blaidd added that his missus was seeing an audiologist whom he referred to as Huw Jeers. Was that the man’s name or his affliction?
Continue readingAs Bella ripped the false lash from her eyelid, a hot salty tear slid down her cheek. An avalanche of smoky mascara followed in pursuit. Flannel in hand she began to scrub the orange skin on her face, enraged she ever thought she needed to be the colour of a carrot. Looking down at the cracks in her ornate gel nails, her anger flipped to exhaustion.
Continue readingThe door to the coffee shop tinkles as Charlotte opens it. At first glance, it bears no resemblance to the busy hairdressers it used to be, though there is something familiar in the warmth that envelops her the moment she steps inside.
It’s called ‘Froth,’ which Charlotte considers an appropriately shallow name for a place that was once called ‘Vanity Hair.’ On the surface, it was just somewhere you came to fix your hair. But the healing went deeper than that. People left feeling better about themselves on the inside as well as the outside.
Continue readingBob Hawkins nudged his empty pint glass across the beaten copper of the barroom table. Opposite him sat Jim “Kipper” Jones, whose weather-beaten face was an object lesson in why digging roads through West Wales winters was no career for an aspiring film star, especially not after thirty years. Bob was no picture himself, either. His lived-in face topped a scrawny frame wrapped in a Gannex mac two sizes too big, fished from the back rail of an Oxfam shop fifteen years earlier.
Continue readingHarlan Ray dismissed modern culture as “a lot of gay shit” and longed for everyone to agree.
“You faggots ever heard of Buster Keaton,” he’d scream. “Son of a bitch wasn’t human, he was a refugee from the planet Krypton. Christ, everybody these days thinks they’re a genius when Hollywood should come with a disclaimer: Only Superhumans need apply!”
Continue readingHearing the side gate opening, Mavis sighed. What’s happened now? Mitzi, Mavis’ poodle, raised her head and groaned, and disappeared behind the sofa. Puffing into sight was Eva, her daughter-in-law with the twins in their buggy. Thankfully they appeared to be asleep.
She stomped in: ”You’ll never believe what your waster of a son has done now!”
Continue reading‘Jed Newton. The hospital? Yes that’s right the wife’s on the list. We was told she’d be a proper good match in the right circumstances but… What? An opportunity has…? I’m not following you, mate. Listen now, she was informed the chances weren’t great due to the rarity of… What? A dying woman has what…? Are you saying Tracy can have her womb transplant?’
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Continue readingIt was feelings of both fight and flight that hastened Veronica’s trip to Milan. She urgently needed time away to collect her thoughts and prepare for an inevitable fight to come.
Already she had mapped out her problem on a series of mental index cards: Simon; nightmares; feedback from friends; and exit.
In the hotel the task began in earnest.
Continue readingIt was after the phone call informing me of the sixth divorce that I looked into my family history.
Sure enough, my mother confirmed I’m from a long line of bad-omen bridesmaids. We stretch out through time like twisted trees in a forest. Every single union attended by one of us as part of the wedding party has ended, sooner or later, in divorce.
But damn, do we look good in taffeta.
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